The Music of Hindostan c7.263

c7.263

The Indian may be disposed to think these melodies too trivial to be dignified by the name of song; he will say his art begins where these stop, and will hardly recognize in them any of the real spirit of his music. The European may protest that they are too fragmentary to be of real use, and that there are too many gaps in the information about the occasion and the subject of each. Both charges are justified; but the object has been not so much to present complete and finished specimens, as to get close down upon those natural instincts of song-makers which, when followed out in the domain of art, cause their music to take one form rather than another; to get behind the conventions, of which all art is full, to the things themselves of which those conventions are the outcome.